Back to the Future: What will the world look like 30 years from now? Four experts take their guesses

In 1989, Back to the Future II predicted a 2015 complete with flying cars, hoverboards and self-lacing shoes. While those are still out of the reach of most, plenty has changed in the past 30 years. So what will our world look like in another 30?

We asked four experts to take their guesses as to what the world will look like in 2045. Here's what they said.

The tech commentator: Self-driving cars will anticipate needs

Technology writer and commentator Stilgherrian said the ability for developers to connect data with software would have the biggest impact on our daily lives.

Driverless vehicles will be everywhere, he said, but they won't just drive themselves — they'll use data to anticipate people's needs.

"The vehicles themselves will be intelligent — not only will they be able to drive themselves, they will know when they will be needed," Stilgherrian said.

"Vehicles will go towards obvious events such as a sporting match [that] is about to end.

"You can tell from how the scores of a sporting match are going whether [spectators] are going to leave early, whether they'll want to go home and sulk or whether they'll want to go out and party."

Another big advance will be in computational linguistics — that is, the way that computers and robots understand human speech.

"We have Siri for Apple, Cortana for Windows and Google Now for Google. Already they're starting to understand our voices and turn that into words. We're right on the edge of the computer systems understanding what the words mean," he said.

"We'll have delivery robots that will look like a fancy car with a grabber arm. They'll look more like Mars Rovers than humanoids, and they'll operate by voice control and gesture.

"Think about how humans actually talk to one another: 'Can you get that thing from over there and bring it here. No not that one, the other one'.

"We will start to assume that the internet — which will be visible to us through the devices around us — will understand what we mean."

The physicist: The energy industry will be transformed

Several types of power technology are on the brink of breakthrough and any one of them could completely transform the energy industry in the next few decades, according to University of Queensland physicist Professor Ben Powell.

Nuclear fusion — the process that powers the Sun — provides huge amounts of energy from very small amounts of material with virtually no waste.

And at the rate international research is progressing, Professor Powell expects commercial fusion reactors to be available in about 35 years.

"To get the same kind of power that you get out of a coal power station that's burning megatonnes of coal in a year you need hundreds of kilos in nuclear fusion," he said.

"You'd have large-scale power generation, it's very clean, it's very safe. It seems almost too good to be true."

Advances in renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and water power could also overtake or completely replace fossil fuels, Professor Powell said.

"Even if you forget about climate change — and I'm not saying we should — there's a lot of money in doing it well. Someone's going to do it well," he said.

New types of superconductors will then transport power more efficiently than current electricity wires, and devices will become more energy-efficient, meaning less power will need to be generated, Professor Powell said.

The social change commentator: Technology will be about connecting people

While predictions of space colonies are fun to speculate about, the future will increasingly be about connectivity between people, according to Antony Funnell, host of RN's Future Tense and commentator on social, cultural and technological change.

"It's easy to focus on technology in an age where the technology is spectacular," Funnell said.

"We've got turbo-driven technological change, it's just fantastic."

He said the rise of smart phones illustrated the need for humans to share and connect with each other.

"People are inherently social. A lot of the new technology, it's the social side of that media that's really important," Funnell said.

"We forget that that's what people naturally want to do."

And as much as predictions for the future focus on change, Funnell said it was important to remember things also stay the same.

"With the future, most people have a kind of abstract concept of it, we see it as another country or another planet," he said.

"The near future is going to be pretty crowded with the stuff we still have today.

"A lot of the buildings, a lot of the clothes, a lot of the social attitudes we have today will still be here."